More about consulting

My friend Michelle - who used to be a consultant with wine companies in California - posted this. THEY'RE ALL TRUE!!!

You present the client your findings and:
- Without opening the report, they check its weight with their hand and say, "Is that it?"
- Your project scope was to do items A through G. You’ve gone further than you’re getting paid for and continue to do H through L. Client has a hissy fit when they realize that you have not done M through Z, even though they are clearly only paying from A through G. Client accuses you of "just trying to get me to pay for more services". (we can’t have that, can we?)
- Your client calls every day the week before a project is due to ask if it’s done yet. You tell them every day that it will delivered on the due date. You deliver it as promised and hear nothing from the client. You call a week later and the client says "Oh, I haven’t had time to read it yet".
- When they actually read the report and say, "Well, there’s really nothing in there that we didn’t already know" which is, to put it mildly, clearly BULLSHIT

You’re about to have the major presentation of findings meeting with the client and:
- The consultant who has done all the work is asked by a senior partner to compile a bullet point list of the key findings – which the senior partner then presents within three minutes of the meeting starting, thereby stealing ALL of the thunder from the consultant who actually has to complete the rest of the hour long meeting
- Said senior partner conveniently excuses themselves 10 minutes into the meeting
- Consultant who did the work (say, me) makes mental note in meeting that "DAMN I gotta become a senior partner one of these days…(or get the F out of consulting!!!)"
- (This one happened to me TWICE): Senior partner received bullet point list of key findings 2 days before meeting – but does not actually READ said document until they are IN the meeting WITH the clients. At this point, senior partner realizes that he has no f’ing clue what he’s talking about, and completely jumbles the meaning of everything that is written down. (Luckily, when he excuses himself 10 minutes later working consultant can actually present findings in a way that doesn’t sound like one of Jerry’s kids has the floor).
- OR – senior partner begins reading findings with recommendations and realizes while doing so in front of the client that he doesn’t agree with the corking consultant’s recommendations!!! This happened with one of the BIGGEST WINERIES IN THE WORLD. I had a really fun time getting grilled and defending my recs to the senior partner, and by the end of the meeting the client was totally thrilled with me and totally annoyed at the senior partner. Nonetheless all the wine they had brought for us as gifts was absconded with by said senior partner.

You spend months working diligently on a project and:
- Your client decides that although ALL of your points are valid and true, they really don’t want to do anything to change the way they do business anyway
- That although you’ve clearly understood the issues, they think that all of this will change if/when their wine just gets a good Parker rating (not that this has ever happened before) or they make a stupid statement like "we really just think we need to have a whole bunch of magazines write articles about us!!!" DUH – why didn’t I think of that? I’ll call Ted Turner right now and just have him run an hour long special on you on all his networks.
- And here’s my favorite (happened tooooo many times) - Your client LOVES your work, implements your ideas, sees a huge increase in business – and then refuses to allow you to tell anyone that you worked with them because they view you as a competitive advantage that they don’t want any of their competitors to know about!!!!